Achieving the desired position in the market is impossible for a company without branding its product. A brand can be defined as a name, term, logo or punch line which differentiates them from each other. Communicating and promoting the product is the most crucial part for any company. Building trust(as we have seen 'T' stands for trust in TATA group) among customers will do half of the work.
In Hindi we have a saying, "Jo dikhta hai wahi bikta hai", so the whole story relies on the brand image of your company. If we talk about brand building, customer satisfaction will come into picture. If the customers are satisfied with the offerings, it results into a strong and long term relationship. If the brand building process is weak, the company cannot reach its desired market share, even if the product is far better than its competitors.
Problems in Brand building:
Lets see why some companies are unable to stand like a famous brand or why they face difficulties in maintaining the break-even point resulting in improper ROI(return on investment). Here are some areas where a company may not focus, which may effect their brand image:
- The company may not have proper exposure to the target audience, making end-consumers less aware about the company.
- The product/brand may not have any distinctive or better feature as compare to the competitive brands. The brand must have a X-factor which will make them stand out among all other brands.
- It is possible that the company is constantly focusing on one type of marketing tool for promotion and not considering other marketing options. One more factor could be, allocating same amount of budget to the same marketing tool each year.
- A company may not be taking much care about the ROI impact for different promotional programs.
Every industry faces different problems in building their brand image and for that, they implement different types of solutions. Lets see some of the ways through which we can improve our brand building and return on investment:
- Use different strategies available in the market for promotion and measure result of each strategy differently.
- Invest money in that marketing instrument which shows increasing effectiveness. There are many ways to market yourself like online marketing, media marketing, social groups, promoting in movies, TV series, hoardings etc.
- Calculate the financial investment and estimate the ROI impact from your investment. All these things should be planned in advance to get a profitable results.
- Try and maintain long term relationship with the customers.
In today's market, branding has gained a lot of importance. For example, Red bull is one of the healthy drink which came into market. When they first launched their product, they did different promotional activities like offering some free samples and information about Red bull in front of shopping malls and super markets. And now after years from its launch its a brand image and they are readily available in all stores.
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| Red Bull (Image courtesy : http://leslie-questionoftheday.blogspot.in) |
We can also see in case of Horlicks brand. GlaxoSmithKline Consumer introduced one more flavor in their product category recently, 'Kesar Badam Horlicks'. The other competitors of Horlicks like Complan, Bournvita and Protinex are also delivering different variant of product in the market. The Complan brand also came up with kesar badam flavor to increase their sale. And in case of Bournvita, they introduced 'lit champs' which targeted the kids of age between 2 to 5. To be in the market, the Horlicks also came up with 'Keasr Badam Horlicks', but on top of it they introduced a promotional kit which includes lunch box for kids. With this strategy, they may attract the consumers of Complan by giving an additional benefit to them. The span of being leader in the market is getting lesser, the companies has to come up with unique things to maintain its position and always trying to be step ahead of their competitors. Consumers pick those brands which they trust and those which deliver 'value for money'.
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| Kesar Badam Horlicks (Image courtesy : www.thehindubusinessline.com) |
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| Complan with Kesar Badam(Image courtesy: www.atmydoorsteps.com) |
To create a great brand, a company should think out of the box to satisfy their customers. Although its totally depends on the customers to make or break the brand, but still companies should try all the possible way to build their brand. Every time they should come out with different branding strategies to be success in this competitive market.
